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A 

RUSSIAN PAINTER'S 

IMPRESSIONS 

OF THE WAR 



SCENES FROM RUSSIA 

AND FRANCE 

By 

Leon Gaspard 



Text, b. 



James B ?Xi arrington 



Reprinted from the 
March number of 
Scribner's Magazine 



y'o? 



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©CUJ26267 
Copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner's Sons 

m 23 19(6 




Cussack i imoch in his cuat <jf lamb's skin 



A RUSSIAN PAINTER'S IMPRESSIONS OF 

THE WAR 

SCENES IN RUSSIA AND FRANCE BY LEON GASPARD 



By James B . 

THE great pictures of the present war 
will be painted when it is over, when 
time has healed old wounds, when 
the world has again adjusted itself to the 
conditions of peace. The artist-histori- 
ans of the future will have had time to 
think upon the great significant aspects 
of this war, with the idea of giving pic- 
VoL. LIX.— 31 



C a r r i n g t o n 



torial permanency to the new conditions 
that have made it ditiferent from all the 
wars the world has known. The aero- 
plane and the motor will have their place, 
and instead of the rushing crowds of 
helmeted and plumed cuirassiers stand- 
ing high in their stirrups shouting and 
waving their swords, with the splendid 

281 



282 



A Russian Painter's Impressions of the War 



impetus of Meissonier's 1807, there will 
be scenes of artillery duels, shells burst- 
ing over seemingly placid hillsides, long 
lines of trenches, ditches dug in the heart 
of the brown old earth, lined with rows 
of riflemen and machine guns, and the 



ist since the world began — "It was the 
glory of war that was the theme of the 
earlier paintings; the exaltation of the 
sovereign, the conqueror, forms the chief 
motive of the war picture of antiquity. 
The monarch was the hero before whose 




Cossack Vagor, whose great ambition is to capture the Kaiser. 



pitiful scenes on the ground that lies be- 
tween the trenches when the fight is over. 
War has lost its glamour, become a grim 
test of waiting, of preparedness, of supe- 
rior machinery and organization. In the 
January Scribner, 191 5, there appeared 
an article on "War and the Artist," by 
Rufus Fairchild Zogbaum. It dealt with 
the wars of the past, wars that were mem- 
orable, but wars that, with the knowledge 
of the present world's war, will be almost 
forgotten. War has appealed to the art- 



terrible sword all foes gave way, to whom 
victory came to his personal might and 
prowess." 

The present war has, as never before, 
enlisted the services of artists in the act- 
ive part of the war itself. Hundreds of 
them have answered the call of their 
countries and gone to the front to serve 
in the trenches, and an appeal is being 
made now for money and clothing for 
their families and children left behind. In 
the recent exhibition of work by French 







283 



284 



A Russian Painter's Impressions of the War 



artists on the firing line, in the gallery of 
the Museum of French Art in the Scribner 
Building, there were many interesting 
sketches in water-color, pastel, pencil, and 
pen-and-ink of scenes at the front. Pic- 
tures of camps, of men in the trenches, 
of destroyed villages, of the wounded. 



and many others that have come from 
the front, there has been no time for elab- 
orate composition, for grandiose arrange- 
ment, for the presentation of heroics. In 
their very simplicity and directness, their 
humanness, their visualizing of the things 
that the war means to many men who 







A little German corporal, prisoner in Russia. 



It was Verestchagin who best made 
known, in his massive canvases, the real 
horrors of war. He was a grim realist 
who spared no one's feelings. Said Mr. 
Zogbaum: " I do not think there is much 
beauty in the canvases of the Russian 
painter Verestchagin, but no one could 
deny the strength and power of his merci- 
less handling of the savage and unhappy 
side of war." 

In the sketches of the French artists, 



simply stand and wait, lies their power, 
their appeal to the sympathies. 

Hanging in the Vanderbilt Gallery of 
the winter exhibition of the National 
Academy of Design in New York was a 
small picture by a young Russian artist 
now in America, whose name is probably 
unknown to all but a few who have been 
familiar with the annual shows at the Paris 
Salon. The picture is entitled " Le Retour 
de Kermesse," and depicts a group of 



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German prisoners passing through Vihia, Russia. 



Russian peasants. It is strikingly rich in 
color, with the reds and blues and yel- 
lows and greens of the very picturesque 
Russian costumes relieved with patches 
of snow, and attracted the notice of 
both laymen and artists by the skilful 
way the painter has arranged and har- 
monized the significant spots of strong 



color. No one could possibly mistake it 
for the work of any one but a native 
Russian. It has the qualities that have 
made the work of the few really distin- 
guished Russian painters so notable. 
Leon Gaspard is known to his own coun- 
trymen as one of the foremost of the 
younger Russian painters of to-day, and 

285 



2S6 



A Russian Painter's Impressions of the War 



for a number of years he has been a regu- 
lar contributor to the French Salon. He 
has recently come to America, after some 
most exciting experiences in following the 
armies in the war zones, including a fall 
in an aeroplane with which he was acting 



He says that the big Siberian Cossack 
Timoch, who was in charge of a hundred 
men, was the real master of their destinies, 
for from him only would they take orders; 
so far as they were concerned he had all 
the power of the Czar himself, or the most 




Ypres, 1915. Senegal soldiers after receiving first aid. 



as observer and narrowly escaped being 
killed. He has brought with him a re-.. 
markable series of small paintings and 
sketches of scenes he has witnessed in 
Russia and France. They have all the 
truth and directness of work done mani- 
festly from nature. They are not in any 
sense studio compositions, imaginary 
things done from memory, or from field- 
notes. They are literal transcripts in 
color of actual scenes done on the spot. 
His one wish now is to forget the war 
as he has known it; he does not even like 
to talk of it. His impressions are too full 
of its horrors. 



begilded general at the front. Fie was a 
genial giant, with a typical Russian peas- 
ant's fondness for the national drink. 
On being presented, after a very special 
request, with a bottle of vodka, no cork- 
screw being handy he gave the bottom 
of the bottle a slap with his big hand and 
the cork departed like a bullet from a 
rifle. Cossack Yagor was about twenty- 
five years old, and quite a different type 
— the sort of Cossack that we read about, 
a wild savage of the steppes, the Cossack 
as he appears in our Wild West shows. 
His one ambition was to capture a Ger- 
man, and each one he captured, or saw 



A Russian Painter's Impressions of the War 



287 



captured he fondly hoped might be the 
Kaiser. 

"The last good-bys " is no doubt typical 
of similar scenes that have occurred all over 
Europe; only here is the background of 
winter snow and the characteristic Rus- 



soldiers, and would no doubt much rather 
be back in the trenches tighting for the 
fatherland. 

The march of the German prisoners 
through the streets of Vilna is another 
scene that is being repeated again and 




German prisoners in the north of France. 



sian costume. There are the same sweet- 
hearts and wives and little children, the 
same heart-breaks, the same feeling that 
many will never come home again. The 
group in the foreground are saying good- 
by to the entraining troops. The little 
German corporal, a prisoner of war (the 
artist says one of the youngest German 
corporals in Russia), is a pathetic small 
figure, but there is something sturdy and 
fine in the spirit of the youngster. One 
can imagine him having rather a good 
time as a prisoner, so far as his treatment 
is concerned. But he seems to take him- 
self very seriously as one of the Kaiser's 



again in both armies. ]\Iany of these pris- 
oners will be probably numbered for a long 
while among the missing, and it may be 
many months before those at home will 
know that some of them may come back 
again. It is a forlorn procession, but gay 
in its outward aspects, with the bright 
colors of the costumes. 

None of the troops in the trenches are 
more picturesque than the famous Sene- 
gals of the French army. They are brave 
fighters, inured to hardships and ready 
to smile over their wounds. Hardly any 
of them know more than a few words of 
French, but these few have signified much 




■ i 



Senegal SI ildlii s resting in a garden of a hospital in northern France. 



to them and they seem never tired of re- 
peating them. They evidently have a 
great admiration, as has all the world, 
for the famous French seventy-fives, and 
lying on the ground with their crutches 
beside them they will repeat again and 
again: " Soixante-quinze, tres bon, tres 
bon, poom poom, poom, poom, poom, 
ah ! " It afforded them much amusement 
also to hold their hands up above their 
heads and call out: "Camarade, cama- 
rade, pardon!" imitating the Germans 
who asked for mercy when they surren- 
dered. Their one great ambition is to 
recover from their wounds so they can go 
back again to the fighting line: "Boche, 
pas bon." 

M. Gaspard's work has long been ad- 
mired among French artists ; a well-known 
Parisian critic writing of his pictures in 
the Salon of last year said: "The work 
of Leon Gaspard is a most truthful and 
signilicant document of the habits and 
costumes of the moujiks, workmen, Jews, 
vagabonds, and poor wretches of the Rus- 
sian country." They are animated docu- 
ments, too, taken from life with realistic 
sincerity. Many of the scenes are made 



brilliant by their landscape backgrounds 
of snow. The artist has been his own 
best teacher, and his methods are dis- 
tinctly individual, though he has had the 
advantages of a Paris schooling, hav- 
ing studied under both Bouguereau and 
Toudouze. Before everything he is a 
realist, never forsakes nature and life, 
and his pictures are not studio-made but 
are done in the open, directly from his 
models as they happen to pass. They 
are admirably composed, and he has a 
fine sense of color. All of his pictures, 
even the very small sketches, have the 
brilliancy and beauty of a fine old mo- 
saic. His palette is a simple one, as he 
employs only pure colors. The finished 
sketches retain the freshness, brilliancy, 
and transparency of pastel and water- 
color. M. Gaspard was born in Vitebsk, 
Russia. He spends his winters mostly 
in Russia on the open steppe and his 
summers chiefly in Paris. He has ex- 
hibited at the Salon d'Automne and Aux 
Artistes Frangais, and is represented in 
the Luxembourg. All of his paintings, 
contrary to those of most Russian artists, 
are quite small. 



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